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Arabia porcelain factory visit

It was “Open House Helsinki” last weekend, offering tours to see places normally closed for public. One of these was the Arabia porcelain factory in the “Arabia district” near downtown Helsinki. The area got the name because the city was much smaller and the area used to be very far from downtown, much like the Arabic countries are from Finland. The porcelain factory, in turn, was named after the area. The streets in the district are also named after exotic and faraway places, like Damascus, India and Berlin. Well, this was all back in the day when travel to Berlin meant something quite more than catching the evening flight!🙂

Well, nowadays all three “big” porcelain names in the Nordic countries; Arabia, Rörstrand and Royal Copenhagen are all owned by the Fiskars Group, which got famous for the orange scissors (in the MOMA permanent collection, btw!). Fiskars also owns Iittala, Gerber and a few other brands. We got to see both the factory and a display of ceramics and the other stuff, and the tour was pretty interesting!

The factory has a gallery space up on the top floor next to the porcelain museum, and there was an exhibition of 4 young Finnish ceramic artists. So much cute stuff, but these pieces were my absolute favorites! Let me tell you, the photos do them no justice… Up top, the little ceramic mountains were made of an amazingly fine porcelain, the kind that has an almost translucent feel to it, and the electrical insulators and other pieces were painted in the most darling colors and patterns!🙂